


Beginner Yoga for Dummies (Darcys) and Sad Hobos

by chailover



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, POV Outsider, Stark Tower, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-03-01 07:40:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13290210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chailover/pseuds/chailover
Summary: Tuesdays were the worst, but Darcy Lewis was determined to have a nice end to the day - an easy yoga class, a calorie laden coffee drink after, and then maybe Netflix. But you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men...





	Beginner Yoga for Dummies (Darcys) and Sad Hobos

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a loooong time ago as a setup for an Avengersmeme prompt and couldn't actually get to the prompt. Oops. But I actually had fun doing a pseudo-outsider POV and Darcy is refreshingly normal after supersoldiers and demi-gods and master assassins. Set after Thor 2 & Cap 2 but before Avengers 2, from Darcy's POV. Slightly AU.

**

"Hey, Marilou," Darcy greeted their yoga instructor as she came in with her mat, whistling. Tuesdays were the worst days of the week, as far as Darcy was concerned, because it was still too close to Monday and too far off from Friday. It didn't even have the dubious distinction of being in the middle, like Wednesday. Which was why it was important for her to have the little late-Tuesday pick-me-up: a nice and relaxing yoga class, followed with the frilliest froofy coffee drink she could get from the in-house Starbucks in Stark Tower.

"Hey, Darce," the older woman replied. It was a light class today - Darcy recognized some regulars along with the handful of newcomers, usually newer employees that were taking advantage of the company's perks for the first time. She unrolled her mat near the back, where the semi-regular attendee that she had mentally dubbed 'sad hobo' had already set up his spot.

She had to remind herself to not accidentally call him that. "Hey," she greeted.

He gave her his usual quiet stare and said, "hey" back, mostly aimed at the ground. She glanced over surreptitiously at him as Marilou called the class to order and started them on the warm-ups. Sad hobo was probably not a hobo, given that he was in Stark Tower and security was discreet but airtight. It was just that he generally looked clean but somewhat unkempt - she had a friend who was in engineering in her last year of undergrad, and he was sort of like that, with longish hair brushed maybe only half the time, stubble more often than not, and always dressed in clothes that look haphazardly thrown on.

Darcy had seen him in class occasionally - the Tuesday night session was a beginners' course, and she also attended an intermediate one on Thursdays when she had the time. He'd been at both, but not consistently, and she was pretty sure Marilou had made a passing comment that he sometimes showed up at the advanced class too.

Most of the other attendees, she knew or could peg their stories with a pretty high degree of accuracy - she could tell that the three women up front, in their designer workout clothes, were probably new to Stark Industries, maybe in middle management. They looked like office ladies. And then there was Letty, Anna and Danielle - Letty was from Peru and loved to talk about her eleven year old son, who had trombone lessons on Tuesdays and that was why she could stay late for the class; Anna had a seven year old who was precocious, and she was planning a trip to Europe for the whole family; Danielle worked in SI's treasury department, and her sister was having twins. Sad hobo was mainly interesting in that he was one of the few guys that showed up for yoga, and he seemed like he should be scary but was mostly just quiet, but it was hard to nail down a feel for him.

"Darcy, focus on your breathing," Marilou said, pulling her out of her thoughts. She took a deep breath and released it, refocusing on her body and its motions. Everything had been quiet lately, which was a relief after Thor and Jane's adventures in London (which still gave her the shakes, sheesh) and Captain America's less worlds-shaking but no less dramatic take-down of SHIELD/Hydra and the chaos that followed. Sure, it's been months and months since that, but she's learned the hard way that it was better to be bored than deal with potentially earth-ending disasters that the Avengers always seemed to be mired in.

Of course, she should've known better than to think she was bored as they moved through the poses, because Murphy's law was always lurking in the wings, waiting to ambush her.

The lights flickered, then went out, in the middle of the cool-down.

A nervous titter went through the class, and Darcy heard Anna whisper, "Is there a power outage?"

The lights came back on slowly, flickering intermittently as Darcy reached for her bag and felt for the new taser that Tony had built for her, 'just in case'. There was normal paranoid and there was Stark paranoid - Darcy liked to pride herself on keeping an even keel in the face of gods and other universe and such, but this was creepy, really creepy, because there weren't any of the post-fire drill/earthquake drill announcements and the tower wasn't supposed to get power outages.

Just as she tucked the taser into her pants pocket and untucked her shirt to cover it, the nervous calm was shattered with a loud bang as the double-doors to the exercise room was kicked open. A few of the women screamed when three masked men, all in black tactical gear, came in guns-first.

"FREEZE!" The one in front shouted. "Hands in the air where I can see them!"

"Oh my god," Darcy gasped as they all raised their hands instinctively in the face of the guns. "Oh, my god."

"Quiet!" Another masked man barked, gesturing with the barrel of his semi-automatic for the group to line up against the wall. "Move it!" Darcy stumbled over the edge of her mat a little in their mad scramble to obey, and Marilou tried to reach over to help. "Move it! MOVE!"

"Hey!" Darcy yelled when the man backhanded the other woman for moving too slowly, "Don't hit her!" Some instinct made her shove at the gun as it swung back to her, just a hair too slowly due to its size and their general proximity to each other, and she did the first thing she could think of in her panicked state. She grabbed the taser from her waistband and let the guy have it.

He screamed and dropped his gun, but in the next instant, pain exploded in her head when he swung wildly at her and his fist connected with her face. While she was still disoriented and trying to see past the pain in her nose and hair in her eyes, and he grabbed her by the wrist of the hand holding the taser. She cried out in pain when his grip tightened punishingly, crushing her wrist.

 _Shit shit shit_ , she thought frantically, writhing as she tried to get away from the agony, _survived Thor and the Convergence only to be done in by plain ol' human dickheads!_

"Bitch!" The first man spat as he scrambled for his gun. The other two men jeered as they looked over, satisfied that Darcy's brief flare of resistance wasn't a real threat. "I'm going to kill you!"

"No, wait," Dickhead #2 said, "we need some hostages, remember? And I think this one is one of the secondary targets. A friend of one of the scientists."

 _Shit_ , Darcy thought again just as someone else said, "That's good, keep talking," and suddenly the guy toppled forward on her and there was complete and utter chaos for about five seconds. The pressure on her wrist abruptly released and she clutched it to her chest, blinking, as the guy was hauled off her.

Dickheads #1 and #3 were on the ground, boneless and still. The remaining man was on his stomach with his arm twisted up in a painful looking lock behind him, sad hobo - who she hadn't even noticed was missing before - crouched on top with one foot planted in the guy's back.

"Wha...?" she gaped.

He had never looked quite comfortable in the class, as if he knew he didn't fit in and tried his best to stay as unnoticed as possible. Darcy thought, for the first time since she had seen him around, that he looked fully present, finally owning the space he was in - the sad hobo was secretly a ninja, Darcy was starting to realize.

He glanced up and frowned a little at her even as the remaining guy panted in pain. "You alright?" he asked.

"What - No, I'm not alright!" Darcy answered. "Couldn't you have done that earlier!?"

"Wouldn't've been as clean," he replied. "Nice try with the taser though," he added, as if that might make her feel better about her single pathetic attempt compared to his effortless take-down of three armed men.

And strangely enough, she did feel a little tiny bit better.

"Fuck!" The man on the ground was swearing and struggling, but stilled when the hold on his arm tightened. Sad hobo - and Darcy really needed a name soon, before she called him that out loud by accident - refocused on their attacker.

"Talk," he repeated, suddenly oozing frigid menace. "How many of you are there? Who sent you? What do you want?"

"You'll never make me talk!" The man spat. Darcy winced at the cliche bad-guy line and exchanged a look with her fellow classmate-turned-savior.

"Go make sure everyone else is okay," he told her, "Get the doors locked and barred up if you can. Call security, they should know something's wrong by now."

Darcy had a feeling that he wasn't just going to sit pretty on the last guy while she took care of all those things, but the pain was still fresh and she guiltily accepted the out that he was offering. "I'll do one better and call Jarvis directly," she quipped, a bit shakily.

He blinked. "You have a direct line to Jarvis...?" Then, "Right, secondary target. See if you can get one of the Avengers on the line, they're probably the primary objectives."

With that sobering reminder, Darcy got to work.

Marilou was just a bit bruised from the blow, immediately waving off any concern and took over the task of helping Darcy secure the doors, hauling some old equipment out of a storage closet with her students to use as a pseudo-blockade. Sad hobo was done with the last guy by the time they finished, and he patted all of them down, relieving the assault team of a small stack of guns, knives, ammunition, and what looked like communication devices and explosives.

Letty and Anna tied them up with great relish and dumped them in the corner, weighed down by dumbbells.

Darcy's face and wrist throbbed in time with her heartbeat, but she found her taser from where she had dropped it when the guy first grabbed her, and set it by her knee as she fished out her phone this time and hit the little panic icon that Tony had programmed. It barely got through the first ring before it connected, Jarvis's cultured tones coming through as clear as crystal.

"How may I be of assistance, Ms. Lewis?"

"Oh, thank god," Darcy breathed. "Jarvis, please tell me security or Thor or the Hulk is heading to floor 68, because I'm holed up in the gym with my classmates from yoga and there are three unconscious dickheads that busted in with guns and were threatening to shoot us."

**

The ending of the harrowing night was almost as exciting as the beginning of it.

There was enraged pounding at the door about a minute after Jarvis assured her that help was coming with all due speed and urgency. Everyone froze with fear but the door held. Sad hobo made them take cover in the storage closet while he leveled one of the rifles at the shaking door.

And then, a voice so familiar and _safe_ that it almost made her cry - "Begone, craven cowards!" Thor roared and the doors - no, the tower shook a little from the warning rumbles of thunder.

"Oh, thank god," Darcy said again. The thumps, thuds and yells were almost comical, and everyone waited with baited breath. A moment later, there was a knock - incongruous in its politeness - at the blockaded doors.

"We're coming in, don't shoot," someone called, and the sad hobo lowered his gun.

"The door's blocked," Darcy called back, but apparently that wasn't a problem, because double doors, locked and blockaded, didn't do any better against demi-gods than armed hostiles.

"Lady Darcy!" Thor shouted as Darcy ran toward him and caught her in a hug. "I am most relieved to see you..." his smile dimmed when he pulled back and then darkened into a thunderous scowl. "You have been struck!"

"I'm okay, big guy, I'm okay," Darcy babbled, pretty much bowled over with relief. Even the dark elves and the giant alien spaceship and the chaos and destruction of the Convergence hadn't shaken her like this, hadn't been so close and personal. "One of them hit me after I tasered him, that's all."

"Who dares?!" Thor demanded, electric blue eyes sweeping the room, past the rest of the class, coming out of the storage closet, surprisingly past sad hobo without a pause, and then alighting on the three men stripped weaponless and tied up with jump rope. He hefted his hammer and released Darcy to take a threatening step toward them.

"Hey, big guy, calm down, it's okay," Darcy said, and at the same time, a slender woman with red hair stepped through the destroyed doors along with about half a dozen security personnel.

"Thor, leave it, we'll need them alive for questioning," Natasha Romanov said coolly, but gave him a commiserating pat on the shoulder when he growled. Darcy blinked in surprise. What was Natasha doing here?

"I will be sure to question the responsible party thoroughly." Thor promised.

Sad hobo didn't smile, per se, but there was something a little lighter in his expression. "You'll want the guy with the burn mark on his forearm," he offered quietly.

Thor nodded. "From Lady Darcy's stinging weapon, indeed."

Natasha turned to them once she was sure that security was busy processing the prisoners and interviewing the others. She looked Darcy over and nodded, then turned her eerie green gaze to sad hobo. They stared at each other, silent and still for entirely too long.

"Uh..." Darcy started, because Natasha can be scary as hell and she actually owed sad hobo and didn't want to see her lay him out in one super ninja move or something. Also because she knew Natasha's legend but she did just see sad hobo actually flatten three guys in less than ten seconds, so if they started fighting...Thor laid one of his huge hands on her shoulder and she turned just enough to see him shake his head.

Finally, Natasha nodded. "James." She said civilly.

Sad hobo - who was apparently a James, nodded back. "Natalia."

"Was that just me," Darcy muttered under her breath to Thor, "Or was that weird?"

"Come, friends," Thor said instead. "Let us leave the good officers to their task. We should return to the place of meetings and inform everyone of the satisfactory conclusion of this rout."

 

**

Darcy had a theory: crazy attracted crazy, working kind of like gravity. It was pretty much her explanation for her life after Thor. And if she had thought the type of crazy Thor attracted was bad, be it Loki or the Warrior Three and Sif, or the dark elves and the Convergence, it was still nothing against what the Avengers manage en masse. 

Apparently even being on the bare periphery of the crazy ensured she got caught in the gravitational well of weirdness. She figured she couldn’t do anything about except roll with the punches. And speaking of rolling:

Thor and Natasha escorted her and James up to the Avengers’ levels after she got a clean bill of health from Medical, citing the need to update everyone with the intel that they had gotten/will be getting from the three subdued attackers. Darcy would have much rather gone to her apartment and have a few stiff drinks to relax from the rush of terror-induced adrenaline and nurse her sore wrist and head, but no one really wanted to say no to the Black Widow, and it would be good to see that everyone else was okay.

“The power outage was a distraction,” Natasha offered as they unlocked one of the elevators - the others were still out of service. “The Arc reactor is fully functional, but one of the lines channeling the power to the uppermost levels was disconnected. They managed to infiltrate in the minute or so it took to reroute power.”

The elevator door opened to the level of Tony’s penthouse, which was surprisingly not overrun with the rest of the team. At one glance, Darcy could only see Tony and Bruce gesturing animatedly (Tony) and shaking his head (Bruce) over the proliferation of holograms.

“Where’s Jane and everyone else?” she asked Thor.

“Jane is with Lady Pepper,” Thor answered.

Tony looked up and waved them over. “Yeah, Foster was on one of the floors they hit and she’s pretty freaked out. Pep’s helping her calm down.” He gestured to one of the holograms and the one that’s a blue wireframe of the tower resized obligingly. “The reason why they were able to get in on such a short downtime is because they attempted a precision strike. It looks like they only hit floors 45, 68, and 90; All the other floors weren’t affected.”

Bruce shifted over to make space for all four of them on the couch. Darcy settled in between Thor and Bruce while Natasha and James opted to stay standing. Bruce took up the debrief, “It didn’t work out too well, and I’m not sure if it was just luck or bad information on their part. Dr. Foster and Ms. Potts were on 45, having their weekly R&D update meeting. Ms. Potts was able to subdue the attackers as they did not appear to be aware of the existence of Extremis.”

“Pep was on fire!” Tony crowed, and Darcy figured it must be some sort of horrible pun because Natasha and Bruce both groaned. Because Pepper couldn’t’ve literally been on fire...right? Then again, with this group… She was drawn back to the conversation when Tony continued. “But yeah, anyway. You were on 68 for the yoga class, and they totally miscalculated on 90.”

Floors 86 and above were Avengers space. “How so?” Darcy asked even as sad-hobo-now-James froze.

“Floor 90’s empty. Rogers’ on an away mission, Freebird was in Harlem, and apparently Robocop here was busy doing better living through yoga.” Tony squinted at James. “Now I’m imagining you in funny yoga positions, how does that even work?”

James gave him a flat stare that was frankly, really creepy. Tony held up his hands in surrender.

“There were only seven hostiles on floor 68,” Natasha supplied, “Same as floor 45.”

If there were teams of seven for each floor and Floor 90 was empty… “Does that mean there’re still bad guys milling around on Captain America’s floor?” Darcy asked, aghast.

“Give us some credit, Lewis,” Tony scoffed. “Barton took care of Floor 90 with Hill and one of her teams. We wouldn’t give the all-clear unless it’s really all-clear. There is one thing though…” 

James gave voice to Darcy’s irritation when Tony and Natasha had one of their silent conversations through eyebrow lifts - for two people that claim to dislike each other intensely, they sure were good at understanding each other without talking. “What?”

Bruce took his glasses off and cleaned them with the hem of his shirt. Glanced at James before looking down and saying quietly, “You wouldn’t need Clint, Maria, and a whole team to clear out seven armed men.”

“How many of them were there?” Darcy blurted out.

At the same time, James asked with deadly calm, “Were they after Steve?”

“Three teams,” Natasha answered. “And, no, not Steve. They probably knew he wasn’t there.”

“They were pretty dumb, but apparently not dumb enough to try anything when Rogers is actually on-site,” Tony scoffed, “Congratulations, Buckaroo! How does it feel to be the belle of the ball?”

James (Buckaroo? Where is Tony getting these nicknames?) gave him the flat stare again. "Thrilled." He finally said.

Her brain, which was admittedly a bit too dazed by the trauma, finally made the connection which should have been obvious. "You're Bucky Barnes?" She gaped.

He gave her a flat look that nevertheless had a hint of wariness. "And you're Darcy Lewis," he replied matter-of-factly.

"Well, yeah, but I'm not famous!" She said.

Tony laughed. "Okay, she's got you there," he told James - Bucky Barnes, NOT actually a sad hobo, Darcy thanked the deities out there that she never called him that to his face. "You're actually kind of infamous."

"Awesome." Bucky Barnes said, sounding like he thought it was anything but.

Darcy had to agree, this had been one of the worst Tuesdays, ever.

**End


End file.
